X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit
X-Google-Thread: fbb9d,9e244a5ae7304064,start
X-Google-Attributes: gidfbb9d,public
From: shivers@ai.mit.edu (Olin Shivers)
Subject: Talk: High-resolution ascii art
Date: 1996/01/27
Message-ID: <4edepu$3uv@miso.wwa.com>#1/1
X-Deja-AN: 136672474
sender: boba@sashimi.wwa.com
organization: Artificial Intelligence Lab, MIT
newsgroups: rec.arts.ascii


When I was a high-school hacker, back in the mid-'70s, there used to float
around a fairly standard set of ASCII art pinups, some scanned-in Playboy
centerfolds. One had a naked woman sitting on a stool, to name a specific
example. These are just about ubiquitous. The idea was to take a
low-resolution bitmap and convert it to a file using different characters to
approximate the darkness of each pixel.

However, I once had a trio of truely amazing ASCII-rendered bitmaps. These
bitmaps were very high resolution: printed on a 130-character-wide
line-printer, you had to put up three strips of output side-by-side, for
a total width of 390 characters, instead of the usual 80 or 130 chars.
Furthermore, these files exploited Fortran lineprinter escapes to overprint
lines, obtaining a much wider range of intensity. The images were quite
large -- perhaps five or six feet high, and 3 feet wide.

As I recall, there were three of these images, of which I can recall two:
- A nude woman, squatting on her heels in the surf at the edge of a beach.
- A rock climber.
On the nude, you pick out the details of the waves in the background surf.

These files are the most fantastic examples of ASCII-rendered bitmaps
I've ever seen, but I lost the data in high school, and have never seen
them since (I found them at Georgia Tech, where I'd hack in my free time).

Has anyone on this newsgroup ever seen these things, and if so, do you
know where I could snag the bits?

It would probably be best to respond by email (shivers@ai.mit.edu), and
I'll summarise all the responses I get in a few days.

Thanks.
	-Olin